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mackenzian

Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

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Reflections on the US-Japanese Internment

Lately I’ve been honoring the Santayana quotation about being doomed to repetition by referring my readers to history:

Habit and memory are a sort of heredity within the individual… Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained[,] infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” —George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1906

As the next administration’s proxies invoke the prison camps where the United States held 120,000 Japanese-American people for four years during World War II, those who lived through that experience are recounting their memories for our benefit.

Actor George Takei shared his experience with an audience in Kyoto, Japan, two years ago. He recalled the day soldiers walked up his drive to force his family out of their house. “I will never be able to forget that scene,” he said. “It is burned into my memory.” At the time, he was five years old.

These things don’t just happen, however. They creep, and we adjust, and they creep some more.

Prior to the Bosnian genocide starting, the same Islamophobic rhetoric seen in the U.S, was spread throughout the former Yugoslavia. ‘Muslims are terrorists,’ ‘They want to spread Sharia Law.’ ‘They want your women to wear hijabs.’ All of that stuff we’ve ignored… Genocide is a slow process, you know… and it starts with words and instilling fear into the people. We’re past that in the U.S.” —Arnesa Buljusmic-Kustura (November 17, 2016)

“You’re worried about a future that’s already here,” Ayesha Siddiqi also wrote last night. “[It] just didn’t touch you yet.” I joke sometimes about the U.S. government being overfamiliar with my iris patterns—because I was required to submit them with other biometric data more than a decade ago. But it’s really not a joke. It’s more than just bureaucracy.

And that’s why I keep writing about history and why others, like Takei and Buljusmic-Kustura keep recounting the targeting they’ve lived through. We do it with the hope that the more we tell these stories, the more that more of us will be able to perceive the social and legal patterns behind and around us; that we’ll use that perception to help us better notice and intervene in the experiences of others; and that, given opportunity, when the old, old story cracks open at this chapter again, we will choose differently than we have before.

Nothing will change until we do.

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Cloud of Witnesses

The latest issue of my discipline’s professional journal, Technical Communication, is online now and the cover‘s quite special.

Art by Heidi L. Everett: on a black background, names in block capital letters, white, gold, and grey, of this issue's reviewers.
Art by Heidi L. Everett in Technical Communication (63:4)

As editor Sam Dragga explains, the cover art lists all of the academics and practitioners who contributed to this month’s articles, including me.

There’s a chapter in Hebrews that catalogues the exploits and experiences of several former or current community heroes: Abel, Noah, Sarah, Moses’ parents, Rahab. Having recounted what these people once did to express their faith, the writer points to “this great cloud of witnesses” whose lives can inspire and encourage.

Even if it appears we’re working on new territory and alone, we aren’t. Remembering those who’ve come before us isn’t just a smart way to recall what they did and gave as we nagivate situations all our own; it’s also psychologically affirming to perceive ourselves as part of a larger collective story than the stories we can write as lone rangers.

As I look at that journal cover, I see a cloud of witnesses. Many of them are alumni from my former department and program, people who’ve actively shaped the discipline of technical communication. We offer new perspectives based on what we’ve learned from being out in the field, and, article by article, we ensure that the discipline also accounts for populations that haven’t historically been included.

A great cloud of witnesses walks with us as we apply the tools of technical communication and rhetoric wherever we are. It’s just up to us to be part of that cloud for the next generation of professionals.

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Perceiving too little

A golden colored pencil: close-up.
Photo credit: MJ S

Sometimes it’s not so much that we’re wrong. It’s that we perceive too little. We can harp on simple answers when we’d benefit more from deep study, or fixate on the footnotes when we’d be better off accounting for the people living out our theories (or even living well despite them).

Unprotected Texts, one of the Christian theology books I’m reading this fall, is all about expanding readers’ sense of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures and the contexts and historical precedents that shaped the texts and the people who created them. Author Jennifer Wright Knust weaves together biblical scholarship and contemporary comments on marriage, desire, and gendered social roles in a way that allows readerss to attend more carefully to the poetry of the Song of Songs, the stories of Naomi, Ruth, and Boaz, the many sagas of David, and the first stories in this tradition: the stories of Genesis.

In chapter 2, Knust explains how “farming and fertility” drive Genesis’ narratives and the development of its chief characters, the patriarchs. The themes of farming and fertiility filter into the stories that the ancient Hebrews told each other, and therefore they shape the understanding that modern readers can reasonably draw from those stories.

If we only perceive the final narratives, and don’t grasp the reasons people crafted and redacted them long ago, we risk misreading them.

Situating the Genesis creation accounts within a context of ancient myth [including Babylonian epic stories] and within the demands of ancient agriculture reminds us that these are ancient stories designed to address the needs and circumstances of Israel, not twenty-first-century Christians and Jews.”

Even if these scriptures are somebody else’s mail, and weren’t crafted for us or our world, they’re still valuable. We can still learn from them, discover a cautionary tale or an inspiration, or become empowered enough to write stories worthy of being handed down generation after generation, just as the ancient Hebrews handed down theirs.

Because as powerful as our inheritance can be, our chief challenge is to build on it and create our own.

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Book: Black and British

Out this week from Pan Macmillan is historian and broadcast journalist David Olusoga’s latest book, Black and British.

The book reviews the histories of Black people in the United Kingdom, from the present day back to the height of the Roman Empire. Olusoga responds to a post-Brexit Britain with a “We’ve been here for centuries.”

Read an excerpt published by the London Guardian to get a taste of its tone and description.

I’m adding it to my Christmas list.

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Resisting conventional waste

Imagine the power of entire teams of people who know who they are and bring their whole selves into collaborative relationships. Imagine communities filled with people who reach out to other people they respect and whose work they love enough to amplify without drama, score-keeping, or the hope of extra credit. Relationships win the race!

“These are counter-cultural priorities, yes. But they yield innovative, financial, and relational results that are far better long-term than living small-hearted, grasping, isolated, and suspicious.” —Me, in June

I’m preparing to move a few states north (details soon, I promise). So I spent several hours this weekend walking around my next work city, reviewing housing options, and learning more than I ever expected about urban apartments.

I also had thoughts how this culture structures itself around plenty, but in so doing, often produces wastefulness.

The first all-you-can-eat buffet I went to in this country was a chain diner in Texas. For so many dollars per meal, one could have as many entrees as one had fingers, and as many different kinds of food as one had toes.

That first time, I piled plates as high as I wanted, and it seemed cost effective until I realized that my wide eyes weren’t soundly judging my actual hunger. The structure of the restaurant made it easy to overestimate how much fuel I could spoon into my body and how much value an all-I-could-eat meal ticket could reasonably give me. I eventually grew disgusted about the meal scraps that restaurant staffers later threw away.

I thought of that diner recently while exploring a 60 year old high-rise with a mandatory heating plan. The building’s management company administers the heat. Residents automatically receive central heat, but can’t customize or modulate it. So, physics being what it is, the top of the building swelters, only the mid-level floors get reasonable temperatures, and no one can opt out.

This sort of plan is attractive to people trying to save cash: how sweet not to have to worry about heat. But I balked quite hard when our tour guide recommended opening windows to let excess heat out. It assumes that waste is normal. Energy conservation, apparently, is not.

Focusing on the micro picture, i.e. how an apartment’s chosen approach allows individuals to rebalance their budget, can sometimes undermine the macro picture: that we are where we are because of both individual and collective choices, that we can stand to be more careful with each other, that we can be more conscious of how whatever works for some of us might nevertheless impact others of us downstream.

“I’m having a really strong reaction to this heat,” I said, sweating.

But the macro picture of collective wastefulness remains whatever I do or don’t do. There’s a structure operating in this and other complex scenarios that is much greater than my own scruples. That structure doesn’t bend because of individual components. We have to learn to deal well anyway.

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Freedom in West Virginia

Photo of bulletin cover: West VA interfaith fellowship.
Today’s blessing: talking about decentralized, leader-full movements, Ella Baker, and Bayard Rustin with Joan Browning, a former Freedom Rider and a member of the 20th Century civil rights movement’s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Since yesterday, I’ve been in Browning’s county in West Virginia. I spoke to a local interfaith group this afternoon about the origins of #BlackLivesMatter; the policy platform of the 50-organization Movement for Black Lives; the faithful imperative to intervene in and transform injustice; and some of my recent experiences with militarized responses to public grief rites—including candlelit vigils.

Over the years, Browning has also reflected on the relationship between her personal religious convictions and her public activist witness. She writes:

I cannot imagine where, except from religious convictions, I may have received the courage and moral clarity to be part of SNCC and indeed to continue living my life today. By the time I found SNCC, I was learning that the church structure taught, but did not practice, beliefs that are central to my existence. In SNCC, nobody in SNCC ‘preached’ but in fact almost all practiced at a clear and indisputable level my fundamental religious beliefs. So, for me, SNCC was not a religious institution but it was a structure that allowed me to join with others and together, whatever their motivation, we were practicing my religion.”

Faith is important to me too. I believe that religious people have a moral responsibility not to be silent when we see suffering, even if paying attention is uncomfortable or inconvenient, and even if intervening means we have to give up our quiet lives and receive push-back both from (a) society that’s quite comfortable with the way things are and (b) fellow religionists whose beliefs permit them to be passive or neutral about social oppression and violence.

Activists have explored this question in various contexts for decades, centuries, even. Each time we ask elders their advice, they offer something like this to the generation that follows them:

a. Remember: We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.
b. Refuse to cooperate with evil.
c. Speak only for yourself. Allow no one to speak for you without your consent.
d. Listen to people speak in their own voice.
e. Recognize how you contribute to oppression.
f. Know that only the injured can forgive.” —Joan Browning, 2004